Last Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Bureau of Land Management is going to "review and reconsider" the oil shale leases proposed in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Bush proposal would have potentially opened 1.9 million acres of land in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming for oil shale development and would have locked in a paltry royalty rate. The Obama Administration is going to take 90 days of public comment on the shortcomings of the old plan and then come up with a new one, potentially in a very short time frame.
Salazar’s and BLM’s comments on the oil shale research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) program do not paint a clear picture about the Obama Administration’s agenda. Last week, Salazar spoke to the National Governors’ Association and told them that oil shale has “great potential” and “that the Obama administration is not against developing any of those resources. … Let's put everything on the table.” Yet the Federal Register notice withdrawing the Bush Administration proposal asks for public comment on a wide range of issues that could derail oil shale development, “including, but not limited to, comments on lease size, lease duration, royalty rate after conversion to a commercial lease, environmental and economic diligence, and whether there is a need for additional preference right lease acreage.”
Salazar’s plan to re-think the oil shale RD&D program is consistent with what appears to be the Obama Administration’s approach to America’s energy future – considering all options, without prejudice to even the dirtiest or most expensive forms of energy. And the plan is entirely consistent with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which requires Interior to manage federal lands under a “multiple-use” mandate. (Under that statute, multiple-use means “a combination of balanced and diverse resource uses that takes into account the long-term needs of future generations for renewable and non-renewable resources, including, but not limited to, recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values.”)
But what we need now is a more progressive approach to energy development and the use of our public lands. According to BLM’s own assessment, commercial development of the oil shale deposits will take dozens of years, require hundreds of miles of new roads, power lines, and pipelines, necessitate the creation of several gigawatts of new electricity capacity, and strain the area’s already scarce water resources. Canada has already started commercial development of tar sands (a geological cousin of oil shale) and evidence of the negative environmental and human health effects is starting to pile up .
Last week, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama spoke of changing the way we produce and use energy. And for months we’ve been hearing about changing the failed policies of the last eight years. Yet BLM seems resigned to considering minor changes to royalty rates and lease sizes. Such policy changes would be an underwhelming complement to the President’s rhetoric about a transformed energy future for our country, and they would do little to improve the Department of Interior’s mismanagement of our public lands.
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Matt Shudtz | March 3, 2009
Last Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Bureau of Land Management is going to “review and reconsider” the oil shale leases proposed in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Bush proposal would have potentially opened 1.9 million acres of land in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming for oil shale development […]
Shana Campbell Jones | March 2, 2009
The Center for Public Integrity released a report last week finding that the number of lobbyists seeking to influence federal policy on climate change has expanded more than 300 percent in five years. The report also finds that special interest industry lobbyists outnumber public interest environmental advocates 8-to-1. That’s right. The most important environmental legislation […]
Rena Steinzor | February 27, 2009
Late last week, I sent a letter to Peter Orszag, Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget that, among other things, called on OMB to allow for public participation in the design of its new Executive Order governing federal regulatory review. I’m happy to see that OMB has decided to do just […]
James Goodwin | February 26, 2009
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would not be accepting an appeal of a case involving the Bush Administration’s regulatory plan for reducing air mercury emissions from power plants. For the last two decades, the regulation of mercury air pollution has been caught up in a long and winding journey reminiscent of Homer’s […]
Christopher Schroeder | February 25, 2009
The following is cross-posted by permission from Executive Watch, a blog maintained by the Duke Law School Public Law Program. Every time the presidency has changed parties in recent years, the outgoing president has issued regulations in the final months of his presidency implementing policies at odds with the policies of the incoming president. […]
Yee Huang | February 24, 2009
Walk into any grocery store and you’ll find a barrage of labels on every product that proudly and loudly proclaims its ecofriendly pedigree: Organic! Fair trade and shade-grown! Local! An article last week in the Wall Street Journal posits two of the latest entries into the fray: virtual water and water footprint. Relatively new […]
Matthew Freeman | February 24, 2009
Time Magazine has a piece this week on Cass Sunstein’s likely nomination to be the Obama Administration’s “regulatory czar” (director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) and the debate over the use of cost-benefit analysis it has touched off. Despite Professor Sunstein's progressive views on most issues, progressives are concerned that his methods […]
Matthew Freeman | February 23, 2009
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger are about to pick up some well deserved hardware for their series on bisphenol A (BPA) – a plastic hardener that leaches from plastic when microwaved. The substance causes neurological and developmental hazards, but it is ubiquitous in food storage containers, including water bottles and baby bottles. […]
James Goodwin | February 20, 2009
In recent weeks, an unusual convergence of events has served to elevate somewhat the public profile of cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Before then, CBA was an obscure and highly complex tool of policy analysis—the kind of thing that hardcore policy wonks would wonk about when the subjects of their usual policy wonkery weren’t wonkish enough. Foreseeable […]